The market's visibility to early quality issues has never been greater and will continue to accelerate. The extensive awareness creates opportunities for the prepared enterprise, and substantial risks for those slow to react.

By Kenneth Wong

September 6, 2019

SIMULIA Road trip

If you are in the Midwest, the SIMULIA mobile van may be heading your way. Dassault Systèmes is launching a road trip called SIMULIA Reveal the World, with a vehicle equipped with demo hardware, software, and AR-VR gear to let you try out its 3DEXPERIENCE simulation tools.

SIMULIA is the umbrella brand for Dassault Systèmes’ simulation software. Visitors onsite can experience a simulated car crash in VR, experience the airflow around a vehicle, participate in a competitive simulation challenge, or watch presentations explaining how simulation helps you design better.

Unreal Engine 4.23

Highlights of the latest version include enhanced real-time raytracing, Chaos physics and destructive engine, and virtual texturing, among others. The new features are listed as Beta technologies presented for review.

The destructive engine was demonstrated at the recent Game Developer Conference. It’s described as “high-performance physics and destruction system available to preview in Beta form” in the new release. It gives you fracturing and clustering tools to control and define how certain geometry will split apart when forces are applied.

Raytracing enhancements come in the form of DirectX 12 Support for Unreal Engine as a whole, improved denoiser quality, and better raytraced global illumination.

This release also comes with support for Hololens 2, Microsoft’s professional grade mixed reality headset.

Unreal Engine lets you bring in CAD data using Datasmith. The technology is a critical component in enabling CAD users to view their assemblies inside the game engine environment, ready for AR-VR experience and interaction.

ANSYS and Edge Case Research Partnership

Simulation software maker ANSYS is partnering with Edge Case Research to develop tools to design and simulate advanced hazard detection in autonomous vehicles.

The partnership focuses on edge cases—scenarios that are not routine driving situations but still within the probability and the autonomous cars must be able to deal with.

ANSYS brings to the table its automotive vehicle development software solutions. Edge brings its Hologram software to identify risks that are difficult to find with other types of testing and analysis, according to the company.

“Edge Case delivers a powerful data testing and analytics platform that unlocks the value of petabytes of AV’s [autonomous vehicle's] recorded road data to find edge cases, significantly accelerating the development of safer, AI-driven perception software. Underlying capabilities have been incorporated into our recently announced collaboration with BMW,” said Eric Bantegnie, vice president and general manager at ANSYS.

GPU-based Bullet Render Farm goes online

ALI Technologies, based in Japan, has launched a cloud-hosted on-demand GPU-accelerated rendering service called Bullet Render Farm. The service is powered by AMD’s ProRender rendering, available for free.

According to ALI, “Bullet Render Farm ... can operate efficiently without limitation on the number of GPUs by using an automated distributed algorithm, unlike a conventional render farm with a limited number of connections.”

The service gives you sample rendering, estimated price and wait time before processing the work. There are student pricing in addition to standard pricing, as shown here.